Nidhogg! A game of swords and worms. Nidhogg! A combative, shared-keyboard game for two knights. Nidhogg! A game of death, death and forever more death. Nidhogg! A game Rock, Paper, Shotgun liked so much that we awarded it our first-ever real-life trophy.
Mark ‘Messhof’ Essen’s lo-fi indie swordfighting title is, like all the best ideas (soup, hats, bio-mechanical ultra-tastebuds) incredibly simple. Two guys battle to the death, with their opponent the only obstacle to riches/glory/something. It’s essentially a side-scrolling fighting game, but with careful combinations replaced by desperate survivalism.

The single greatest thing Nidhogg does that one player’s death does not result in their removal from the game, but instead a precious few seconds for the victor to peg it further to the left or the right without impediment, depending on which player he is. Several screens far left and several screens far right awaits… well, I won’t go into that. Your only manner of getting there is to snatch a few metres of progress while your felled opponent waits to respawn. Because when he respawns, it’s right in your way again. Sure, you’re a bit further along, but you’re still faced with a mirror image of your one-colour, sword-wielding self. You must defeat him once more to gain even an inch.

Fight. Run. Fight. Run. Fight. Ruuuuuuuuuuuuun.

The single greatest thing Nidhogg does is that it is, invariably, a constant push-me, pull-you. A game can last 30 seconds, or 30 minutes. Or 30 days. Facing off against Quinns at the Expo, I initially lost ground at a life de-affirming rate, as he’d cheekily managed to play the thing on the previous day. But, just before he reached his final, far-left screen, I picked up enough of a feel for the fighting to fend him off. Back! Back! Inch by pixelly inch I stabbed and sliced and parried and jumped and slid and lucked my way back right, back to the centre ground. At which point we died more or less simultaneously, which causes the game to reset. I’m going to go ahead and call it a victory anyway, and if he says otherwise just ignore him, because he’s young and doesn’t know better.

The single greatest thing Nidhogg does it that the fighting itself is a curious and immediate mix of precision and reckless abandon. Your sword can be held at one of three heights, which you alter dependent on where the enemy’s held his – or, more to the point, where you think the enemy is going to hold his. A single blade-on-flesh kiss means immediate death, and a few seconds of crazed sprinting for the victor. You can jump over the enemy’s sword. You can slide under the enemy’s sword. But you probably won’t. That is, however, where the lunatic merriment lies. It’s a series of strategies and panics, reacting with both instinct and animal terror when the enemy runs or lunges at you.

When it works, it’s beautiful. When it doesn’t work, and you collapse shamefully to the floor in the middle of a dramatic leap, it’s hilarious. He’s gonna do it! He’s gonna… No. Splat. Sometimes it’s simply inept, running directly into an aloft blade like a sprite with a determined death wish, or cooling slicing open your foe’s guts then immediately plunging into a death-pit when you turn to run on. Sometimes it looks like incredible expertise: a quick 180 flip as you’re running, transforming your cocky pursuer into yellow or orange-hued prey, or a perfect hurdle over a waiting enemy and disappearing off to the next screen before he can react. Whatever your fate, it always, always looks exactly 48 times as dramatic as your own, six-key actions.

The single greatest thing Nidhogg does is that you can throw your sword. It might hit. It might not. It’ll certainly leave you without a sword, and then what? Run on, or run to where one lies on the ground, burning precious time and leaving yourself vulnerable. It’s a wonderful risk-reward gambit, but better yet it happens accidentally half the time, leaving you looking mad as a hotpot full of badgers.

The single greatest thing Nidhogg does is that it understands how to entertain a crowd as well as its players.

The single greatest thing Nidhogg does is that you absolutely cannot win. Or can you? There are things I don’t wish to spoil, even if they are already in the public domain.

It would fall apart with a ping over about 40. Look at how tiny the movements are, yet how enormously important each one is. It’s like a micro-scale fighting game, and they’re pretty much the single least lag-friendly genre in existance.

Newer, more expensive keyboards apparently don’t have that issue. Unfortunately, mine does. So when I do play it, I’ll use Joy2Key to map the controls to a paid of Sega Saturn controllers and play it in the most awesome possible way on a big-screen TV.

Don’t know. I can’t think of any better moment to break this out than during a few drinks with friends in one room. Forget t’internet. It is ludicrously fun both to watch AND play. The silly-fun thing about Nidhogg is that it has such a simple set of commands – but as two people play (right next to each other – intimate), it results in a stupid amount of combination of outcomes. As a friend explained, the best games are ones that give people anecdotes to tell.

You know what also makes it fall apart? Always pressing more than 3 keys at the same time (on a cheap keyboard), making all other keys (especially those of the other side) ignore being pressed.
The amount of matches I lost back in the times, playing Mortal Kombat on a PC, just because the other side was blindly pressing keys like crazy, can not be count anymore.

I played this a while ago at an Intel art exhibition. It’s good and all, but I honestly don’t see how it beats any of the other games at the indie jam. It’s fun for the first few minutes, and it has a certain competitive feel, especially when you’ve been on the free wine but, m’eh, it just didn’t do it for me. Fluid and fun in the short term, but ultimately not something I’d ever investing real time in.

It was the combat from the original Prince of Persia given an oh-so-fashionable-8-bit makeover in my eyes and certainly didn’t have the long term appeal or depth of something like Frozen Synapse or Revenge of the Titans.

This was absolute glorious joyous fun. At its best is when you’ve lept over your disarmed foe, sprinting towards the next screen while your opponent has picked up his sword and thrown it at you (swords travel about half again that of running speed), out running a flying sword is hilarious.

I loved the fact that not only is it the people playing that piss themselves laughing but everyone watching giggling themselves stupid.

I’m looking at the videos, and from them it’s impossible to make sense of how this game actually plays. How do you raise and lower your sword? What happens if you both move forward with the sword at the same height? What decides who wins and loses in a fight when both players have their sword out (it looks random to me from the videos)? How does disarming work?

May I beg someone who played it to explain the mechanics a little more?

The fighting sounds identical to the legendary Bushido Blade. Different stances (high /medium/low), thrown weapons, one hit kills. Back in the day, when me and my mate were exactly the same level of skill a fight in that would last about half an hour, dodging and climbing, waiting for the one opening then… snikt. Dead.

It wasn’t a PC game though (shocking!), so I guess Nidhogg will do, nice to see someone (finally) taking on those ideas and applying them to something else (also see: Demon’s souls. Also not on PC. Its like I’m trying to wind everyone up here, isn’t it :-)

Anyone remember Marshmallow Duel? I still wish i could find more people to play MD with on a shared keyboard. MDuel hails from 1996 as far as I can determine. It’s a 2-player deathmatch very similar to this but involving 3 tiers of platforms and ropes connecting them above a deadly marshmallow ocean. The platforms are randomized on each round. There are 3 bubble dispensers (left/right/top) that randomly give out items. These include jump boots, parachutes, a 6-shot gun, electricity charge, invisibility, land mines, nuke pucks, grenades and instant-death.

The gameplay consists of trying to watch what your adversary is grabbing while racing to grab an appropriate counter item. Since you can only have one item at a time, bumping into an item bubble can cause some interesting interactions. It is ridiculously fun to play. Chaotic and hilarious while stoking the fires of vengeance. I still have the binaries that work in XP32.